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My sense was that post-mil looked back into history, and that it saw either Nero or some other Caesar as the Anti-Christ. I saw it easily aligning with the preterist outlook that much of biblical prophecy had already been fulfilled. I also saw it thinking that since this tribulation was past that all that remained was the gradual displacement of the kingdoms of this world with the Kingdom of Christ, at the end point of which He would reign. At one point (that point?) this world would end and a new world would begin.

Am I correct in thinking that post-mil no longer looks for a prophesied, rising anti-christ and an accompanying period of tribulation? Your quote above would seem to indicate that sometimes things might look like such, e.g. perhaps Hitler's Europe, but that that period truly was in the early years of Christianity.

Also, if that was a past period, then what is the threat that many see with the Catholic Church, calling its pope "antichrist." Is that a metaphor for an ac-like interference with Kingdom Christianity?

Good questions.

For me they were answered best along the lines of Reformational thinking. We are told there will be multiple anti-Christs who are stumbling blocks along the way of fallen humanity as His children are sanctified and brought home. These lovers of lies are tempters. They are connivers to the point where, if God did not prevent it, they would fool even the elect. That's pretty clever.

Nero, Hitler, various popes...they all preach another Gospel. We are to expect their appearance and rebuke them in the name of Christ, always confident that He who is in us is stronger than any of them.

It makes Scriptural sense to me that the spreading of the gospel, as God says, will "not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11). Christianity has a positive affect on the society around it. That is a demonstrable fact.

Likewise, it makes Scriptural sense that most prophecy has been fulfilled (which also leaves a lot less room for extra-Biblical messing-about. We all tend toward superstition naturally and the best safeguard against misunderstanding the present and future is a secure knowledge of the past.)

"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,
Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world" -- Hebrews 1:1-2

But look at what this conversation on eschatology has done. It has taken the righteous heat off the pope's foul call for a global authority and side-tracked the discussion onto non-salvational matters among us -- which is very much something an anti-Christ might enjoy doing.

I think Christians generally have little awareness of just how vast and prolonged the counter Reformation was/is.